( via / me )

Stand of Birches.

"Sea Change

I Throwing the Stone

The sea is a stark · Sargasso still-life
choked with wrack · in rafts of torpor.
Great skeins of eelgrass · skirt the reefs
round islands slumped · in lumpen stupor.
As mud-bound moon-snails · sink in their spirals,
slimes slide with the tide · where it puddles the pebbles.
I test one for heft. My stifled mind mills
with storms and maelstroms. The sea stays still,
unruffled. Not even · reflections tremble.
It’s close and clammy. Before I know it,
I've thrown the stone. A crash... I climb…
Winds lash and the splash · has become a tsunami.

II Awaiting the Wave

Black, you broach as you · breach the horizon,
fall, lunge forward, surge · long miles landward,
wide killer-pod wake. You close like an omen.
Head-crack on rock you · crash-land, transform
to migrations of sea-birds, surf-white and fanned,
to the wall of an iceberg, an imminent icefall.
Thirty feet up, from lobster-claw fingers
I cling to this cliff · in the pall of your power,
pilloried by consequence, waiting your sentence,
your cliffhanger verdict · of vapor or vengeance."

--John Beaton via Forgotten Ground Regained

"Opposite Guar-Kala is a city of the dead: the sprawling necropolis of Mizdarkhan."

"If we could recover the uncompromising spirit of one's youth, one's greatest indignation would be for what one has become." --The Counterfeiters

"They suggested the creation of 'radiation cats' or 'ray cats' whose fur color would change when exposed to high levels of radiation." (use 12ft.io) More. A 2017 contest.